Just when you thought fancy effects on Linux desktops started to get remotely understandable, focussing on Aiglx/Xgl with Compiz, a fork of Compiz is announced: Beryl. This is the logical continuation of the popular compiz-quinnstorm branch, used by many Ubuntu users. "During this summer, and during the last few weeks, some major additions were done in compiz-quinnstorm, bringing a whole new decorator, cgwd, which was designed to be fully themable, and a new settings backend, csm, which intended to drop most of the gnome deps - there were other reasons for this, but this is not our current subject. Consequently, we reached a situation where it's quite impossible to come back." The main reason is general unwillingness to work with and unresponsiveness to the developers of the -quinnstorm branch from the official Compiz guys.

I believe KDE 4.0 will include an experimental compositing Kwin with effects that will further improve as the 4.x series progresses?

Kwin for KDE 4.0 already has the compositing support, the planned upgrade to kcompmgr was more or less merged into kwin.

The struggle they have now, at least from one of the dev posts I saw a month ago or so, is that they need coders for the graphical effects beyond the transparency and shadows KDE already has today.

Seems to me, that with this project officially forking and becoming independent, it might be worth the kwin or plasma team exploring the possibility of interoperability with some of the plugins and add-on features. The KDE devs could leverage some of the OSS development going on with Beryl, and Beryl would gain much more visibility and support, ideally leading to increased development aid and bug tracking/patching while still maintaining independence from any one entity or distribution. Win - win.

By the same logic I wonder if the metacity devs can't do the same thing for Gnome? Maybe taking it a step further Beryl could become some sort of a freedesktop standard for desktop 3d effects that would be environment/wm agnostic, requiring only some sort of interface between the windowmanager and Beryl. Might also prevent the windowmanagers from becoming bloated and overdeveloped since they don't have to sacrifice stability and possibly performance by re-inventing the wheel to produce the effects natively.

Of course, that's a completely uninformed opinion coupled with a healthy dose of wishful thinking since I have absolutely no idea of what would actually be involved to make that level of compatibility happen. But it's nice to think about.

Maybe taking it a step further Beryl could become some sort of a freedesktop standard for desktop 3d effects that would be environment/wm agnostic, requiring only some sort of interface between the windowmanager and Beryl.

Compiz is already an essentially desktop-agnostic system. The effects and features are developed independently of the desktop integration plugins, so you don't need Beryl for this. I'm actually quite fond of the compiz plugin system and I'm wondering if this system won't be superior in the long run to the "monolithic" approach of metacity and KWin.

Compiz is already an essentially desktop-agnostic system. The effects and features are developed independently of the desktop integration plugins, so you don't need Beryl for this. I'm actually quite fond of the compiz plugin system and I'm wondering if this system won't be superior in the long run to the "monolithic" approach of metacity and KWin.

Absolutely agree on the last point, it would be nice to see metacity and kwin take a modular approach. Frankly I don't really see anything lacking on my desktop with quinn/cgwd vs. when I was running kwin with kcompmgr, it's just as stable and useable. I'd really like to see Gnome and KDE work with Beryl on metacity/kwin rather than re-invent it, otherwise users will be forced to choose one way or the other rather than possibly have the best of both worlds.

I don't know how well that could work. Beryl/Compiz plugins are written in C, so you'd need to be able to load them in C++ and they'd need a total rewrite as plugins in compiz are raw xlib programmed, no KDE, no GNOME just X11 programming.